Heart Like a Rock Cast in the Sea
by jadelitfireflies
Summary: Major spoilers for Dead Man's Chest. Elizabeth comes to terms with what she's done and how she feels, and in the process discovers where somebody might have gone to.


I've seen the movie twice now  
and _cannot get over_  
all the Elizabeth/Jack hints/realities there are,  
so I can't stop writing these little blurby stories.  
I really don't think they're supposed to  
go anywhere practical  
but I didn't really plan them to,  
either. Anyway  
I hope you like it, haha.

* * *

It takes Elizabeth two days to get over Jack Sparrow. Really, it takes one day, a mirror, and Barbossa, but what matters, what's important, is that after two days, forty-eight entire hours, Jack Sparrow is completely gone from Elizabeth's mind and Elizabeth is perfectly back to normal. Perfect. Normal. She's fine. 

This chain of events starts on the first day, the first morning after the last afternoon when she'd chai-- left-- when the kraken attacked -- captured Captain Jack Sparrow temporarily, kind of, when Elizabeth wakes up with the compass in her sleep-saturated hand and Will Turner slumped across from her by the wall. And Tia Dalma in the doorway. Tia Dalma is exactly the sort of person Elizabeth chooses to dislike the most, being that Tia Dalma is all-knowing and sleepy-lidded, almost like Jack, though more insulting and threatening, but Elizabeth wakes to Tia Dalma smiling navy liquid and beckoning her from her cot in the hallway.

"I be wantin' to talk to y'girl," says Tia Dalma, when they're clear and out in the jungle-dark bayou morning, "I don' know what be makin' Jack call you 'Lizzie,' but I know how to see into your heart."

Elizabeth is distracted. She can't focus, hearing Jack's name. "Jack Sparrow," she begins to rant tyranically, but the name just catches somewhere in the back of her throat and panicked she clutches the compass a little tighter.

Tia Dalma says, meeting her eyes, "I've told William Turner about the heart of Davy Jones but not about yours, _Elizabeth_." She's grinning, pleasure-drunk. "Lizzie cut out her heart, and she chain it to the Black Pearl, and it sink to the bottom of the sea," is a bit much for Elizabeth to take this early in the morning, but Tia Dalma says it anyway. Elizabeth's shaking slightly. Just a little, just enough for the grief and guilt to overcome her again. The bottom of the sea, she thinks. Davy Jones' locker. Elizabeth's seen the crew of the Flying Dutchman. Elizabeth's almost drowned once.

She says, "I'm going to be sick," in the same way she's said some other things before, like, "I can't breathe," a long time ago and "Yes," yesterday afternoon, and Tia Dalma leads her to a powder room - or a voodoo death temple, Elizabeth can't decide - somewhere upstairs, and leaves her.

There's a basin and Elizabeth grips it with both hands and a compass. It's only fire-fly light and what looks like water with violet petals, but she glances up slowly to her reflection in the mirror and recoils. She looks normal, if not a bit unclean, but it's the eyes. They're wide. It's like she's in shock. When she looks close enough, she can see Jack's eyes, and honestly, honestly, that's the problem. There's too much of leftover Jack on Elizabeth for her to feel sane. She tries washing her face but it doesn't work. She feels the water and her fingers course over tiny paths of dirt traced into her skin from the salt air. Elizabeth feels Jack's fingers course over her cheekbone, her jawline, the back and side of her neck, and turns away.

What Elizabeth needs is a drink.

It's easy to come by with Barbossa waiting for her outside the door. Barbossa laughs at her last, public little composure, right at the doorframe, at her passing a hand over her forehead and nose and saying, "Okay, Elizabeth, you can do this," and he takes a swig from a rum bottle and wheezes into her face.

"Well hello, Miss Turner," he says, and smiles, "Always a pleasure to be running into you, now."

"Barbossa."

"An intelligent retort as always. I wouldn't happen to be catching you having a passing fancy over old dead Jack, now, would I?"

"I was sure you preferred apples over rum, Captain," Elizabeth tells him, but Barbossa was never bought that easily. He lets it go and follows her, clunking down the stairs, out to the front of the house, and every time he steps she hates it because the footsteps sound like Jack's footsteps would sound. Every step is the same. He has to be doing it on purpose. "Did you have something to discuss, sir, or to what do I owe the pleasure of your accompaniment?"

"Pleasure, now, there's a word I like to discuss." The monkey falls out of nowhere to land on Barbossa's shoulder, causing him to laugh so wheezily at her again. "I would however like to understand the circumstances Bonny Captain Jack Sparrow met his timely demise?"

"Went down with his ship," Elizabeth struggles out, and all around the compass her palm is sweating, and she wants to collapse.

Barbossa is a bastard. He says after a swig, "I've believed many a thing about Jack Sparrow in my day, Miss Turner, but I will never believe he put the Pearl before his own life. Even if it was his life."

Elizabeth doesn't really answer, just snatches the rum bottle from the man's hand and downs the rest of it in one go. She shoves it at his chest, glaring at him, and says, "It's Miss Swann," and marches inside.

The rum odyssey for Elizabeth at this point begins. Barbossa's small recovery room only holds another half-bottle but Gibbs produces a nice-sized flask of the stuff for her, and by the time Will wakes up she's a little more than tipsy. He finds her entertaining Pintel and Ragetti with the story of her puppeting the ghost-dress onboard the ship Will eventually sunk, but Elizabeth doesn't allow Will to save her honor this time. When he pleads with her to, please, come down off of the table, she just kicks at him, and Tia Dalma laughs up from below.

Tia Dalma says, and Elizabeth catches it hazily, "Feed her the drink of man and the secrets of Elizabeth's men will feed us," which is a good enough invitation to drink as any. She takes Tia Dalma's drinks with gusto, drinking alongside the men, even invites Barbossa to join while forbidding the monkey. This is because Elizabeth is perfectly fine and can cope like any pirate copes after his or her captain has been eaten by a sea monster.

The first time Elizabeth swaggers like Jack it suddenly isn't funny anymore. She swaggers and jokes to Marty, punchily waving about with her tri-cornered hat, "Welcome to the Caribbean, love," and Marty's face morphs into this ridiculous drunken empathetic commiseration. Will isn't looking at her, and Gibbs is throwing the rum back violently, with a point. She doesn't look at Barbossa. She's embarrassed. Her face and neck are burning and she thinks, _what am I letting happen to myself?_ and starts to cry. Stumbling a bit, Elizabeth removes herself from the room with a, "Well, I think I'm a bit tired now," which even if she'd been able to say all the words correctly wouldn't have solved anything, and she heads to her cot in the hallway.

What she doesn't notice is Tia Dalma following her. Tia Dalma sits at the base of her cot where she's crumpled and says, "Let me see the compass, child," and _like _a child Elizabeth grips it defiantly and says, "No, ish mine, he gave it to me," to which Tia Dalma says something even more ridiculous.

She says, "Jack be in a bad place right now, but Jack come out of it."

"Jacksh dead," Elizabeth manages, and realizes she's pitiful. She's crying. She holds at her heart with the compass, can feel her heart breaking. She left him. _She _left _him_, and if Jack's dead it's _her _fault and she'll never see Jack again; there's a ridiculous, gaping hole where her honor and heart should be. "Jacksh, I killed him, chained him to the thingy, got eaten," Tia Dalma smiles at, and pets her as if she's five.

"Lizzie can't put Jack nowhere he can't get out of," Tia Dalma says, and flips open the compass and the needle stops moving. Elizabeth tries to focus on it but it's hard to when her eyes are burning and everything's swimming around her. It's pointing _somewhere_, though, and the seer-woman seems to think that's important.

She doesn't pass out after Tia Dalma leaves. She watches the needle as much as she can, watches how it doesn't move. When Will comes in to watch her she turns toward to wall and pretends to be sleeping, but really just adjusts to let the tears fall silently down the bridge of her nose onto the compass' face. She dreams back to Norrington on the Pearl and thinks, _every man I am around I bring to misfortune_, just as Gibbs told her the day they found Will.

Elizabeth doesn't wake up until the next afternoon, and when she does she wakes up with Pintel and Ragetti staring her in the face. She sits up suddenly, holding her head, and starts to say, "Where's Jack?" before she sees the look in Will's eyes, slumped by the wall again.  
Pintel offers her, "Captain says we'd best be gettin' a move on, and if we wouldn't wake the pretty lady ourselves."

"Pretty lady ourselves," Ragetti interjects, and laughs, and Pintel continues, "But since ye was gettin' so upset about old Jack we thought we'd skip the wakin' and carry ye out to the boat ourselves, because we're gentlemen like that, respectin' yer beauty sleep."

Elizabeth winces. Her head hurts and everything's in flashes - the boat - the monster - Jack's lips - the needle - and Will, but she tries to smile. She says, "Thank you, but I think I'll be all right," snippishly, and Will sneers at the two mockingly before they leave and she thinks, we really are a crew. Will's staring at her.

"Good morning," he says, and it's a start.

She lets him help her up. They won't talk about it now. But they've known each other too long to jump into things.

Tia Dalma, when they leave just after dusk, holds her by her thin arm with her filthy, compass-filled hand in her own. The men are in the boats and Tia Dalma tells her, "You bring Jack back, now. Jack have my heart too, Elizabeth," and Elizabeth in her hungover state grows a bit angry at herself and everyone. She thinks back to her reflection in the mirror, Sparrow-ridden, and to Barbossa's laughing-mocking gaze, teasing, diminutive, and squints her eyes a little. Elizabeth's a lady but more recently Elizabeth has become something else.

Elizabeth thinks, maybe Jack's dead but for right now I'm going to decide he isn't. She's mourned him for a day and a half - an eternity on the Caribbean - but she's not going to let that let them treat her like his lovesick widow. She's had a few fiancees, after all.

"I think I can handle it," Elizabeth tells her, and meets her blood-stained eyes perfectly. Tia Dalma follows her out to the boats and Elizabeth enters the one with Barbossa and Will and doesn't even look back to the bayou-house, just swats at that damned monkey and flips open the lid of the compass and tells them their bearing.

When they start to move, she hears it one more time, just slightly in her ear, the last thing Jack said to her. It's a little stronger than Miss Elizabeth Swann, a little more daring than Mrs. Turner or even Mrs. Sparrow.

Because Jack looked at her from where she chained him and said, grinning like a dying cat, eyes mixed with anxiety and betrayal and a bit of admiration and _maybe a touch of something else_, and said: _Pirate_.


End file.
